1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to brokering services.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventional distributed processing systems use remote method invocation (RMI), web-services, remote procedure calls (RPC) and other services to perform information processing. These conventional distributed processing systems typically hard-code or embed selected service identifiers into the system. Other conventional distributed processing systems select services using a service discovery system. Conventional service discovery systems, such as the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration service (UDDI), the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and the Web Service Transactional Language (WSTL) and the like.
Conventional WSDL and WSTL services are further discussed in “Handling Dissimilarities of Autonomous Equivalent Web Services”, by Valdino Azevedo, Paulo F. Pires, Marta Mattoso, in Workshop on “Web Services, e-Business, and the Semantic Web (WES): Foundations, Models, Architecture, Engineering and Applications”, Conference on the Advanced Information Systems Engineering (Caise 2003), Klagenfurt/Velden Austria, 2003.
Other conventional systems such as the Web Services Management Layer (WSML) use rules to determine the recipient of a service request. The WSML framework is discussed further by Bart Verheecke et al in “AOP for Dynamic Configuration and Management of Web Services”, part of the Proceedings of the International Conference ICWS-Europe 2003, in Lecture Notes in Computer Sciences Vol. 2853, pp. 137-151, 2003, Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg 2003. These conventional routing systems allow for delayed binding of the service to service provider and/or service recovery through re-direction using rules. However, these conventional service discovery systems typically lack adaptable mechanisms to select between services offering the same service within a class of functionally identical services. Thus, systems and methods for brokering services based on data features would be useful.